The 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001 is a moment to reflect on the passage of time since those awful events and to remember how the world changed that day.
Acres of newsprint and the voluminous findings of the 9/11 Commission have catalogued in exhaustive detail the warnings that were missed, the chronology of the attacks as they unfolded, and the lessons learned after the fact.
Looking back at the anniversary from the distance of a quarter century, what has been striking is the difference in how younger generations too young to recall the events of that day engage with 9/11.
In the run-up to the anniversary, social media was awash with accounts of young people expressing surprise at viewing the footage for the first time as well as a range of opinions as to what should (or ought not) to have happened.
This builds upon the decades of conspiracy theories about the attacks which predated the social media age but acquired new life in the online free-for-all that has taken over so much of the Internet over the past decade or so.
I first came across these conspiracy theories when a relative of mine insisted I watch a documentary on YouTube about five years after 9/11, which seems almost analogue today.
One of the most striking generational differences in how to view 9/11 is that those of us who recall the day in crystal clarity recall not only the shock and incomprehension as the scale of the attacks unfolded but also the utter confusion as to what was happening in real time.
Watching the television coverage on that fateful afternoon (in Europe), we had no way of knowing how many airplanes had been hijacked, how many more targets would be hit, and there was constant media reporting about potential other incidents across the US.
Initial speculation that tens of thousands of people may have died in the attacks, up to 30,000 or 40,000, thankfully proved not to be the case, but they illustrated the febrile atmosphere of a day in which most people following the news had a sense that the world had just changed.
And the world did change, as the George W Bush administration vowed to track down the perpetrators of 9/11 and put the US on a war footing.
While suspicion fell almost immediately on Osama bin Laden as the most likely perpetrator, it was also the case that successive presidencies – Bill Clinton’s as well as Bush’s – had been slow to act upon the increasingly violent statements emanating from Al Qaeda from 1996 onward, and the demonstrations of capability, not just intent, to mount large-scale suicide attacks, as witnessed in the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in August 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole while it was in harbour in Aden in October 2000.
Even as an undergraduate back then, albeit one with an interest in international affairs, I was aware of bin Laden and his apocalyptic railing against the US from about February 1998 on.
The war in Afghanistan began less than a month after 9/11, on October 7, 2001, and that in Iraq 18 months later, on March 19, 2003.
As a postgraduate by then, I recall being struck by the degree to which my American counterparts believed the Bush administration when it made the case for a link between Saddam Hussain and 9/11, a connection that senior British officials, including the-then head of MI6, sought to downplay on their visits to Washington.
I vividly recall one American student pushing back against scepticism that there was any such link by asking “why would the president lie to us?”.
Those were indeed more innocent times.
It is, of course, a supreme irony that the 20th anniversary of 9/11 took place just weeks after the chaotic US withdrawal from Kabul amid scenes that shocked the world, not least as the Taliban swept back into power in Afghanistan.
The fact that the Taliban were able to regain power and dismantle the governing structures put in place over the 20-year intervention prompted heavy soul-searching as to what the Afghan war had been all about.
The chaos of the final withdrawal of American forces also inflicted lasting damage on Joe Biden’s approval ratings, which dipped into negative territory for the first time in his young presidency in August 2021 and never recovered.
A television interview Biden conducted with ABC News a couple of days later also provided the first suggestion of cognitive decline as the president appeared to stumble his way through answering questions and did so in a faltering voice.
The other supreme irony is that Donald Trump campaigned so forcefully in 2016 against the “forever wars” and foreign military entanglements of the Bush and Barack Obama years, and again in 2024 on a promise of “no new wars”, yet now finds himself bogged down in what could easily become a forever war of his own with Iran.
It is hard to pinpoint anything specific that prompted Trump to shift away from the caution he showed during his first term at using military force, especially in June 2019 when he backed away from airstrikes against Iran at the last minute, reportedly citing the risk of civilian casualties.
Trump does appear to believe that many of the intelligence and policy failings – of collection, analysis, and action – that marked the 9/11 period justify his frequent criticism of the “deep state” and may have played into his “drain the swamp” narrative which has proven such a potent political weapon for him.
9/11 changed the world we live in, in so many ways.
It marked the beginning of the 21st century far more than the calendar change on January 1, 2000, and its legacy continues to make itself felt a generation later.
Indeed, the sunny Tuesday morning which dawned along the east coast on a beautiful autumn day in 2001 seems a different age to our own.
- The writer is a leading scholar specialising in Gulf politics and international political economy, and a fellow at the Baker Institute and co-director of the Middle East Energy Roundtable.